5

Would it be possible that if a user views revision history and timeline, if edit summaries contains a link, then this could be opened by clicking on it, rather than having to copy and paste the link?

I can imagine some situations where the edit might be accompanied by some link, most often link to the relevant (per-site)-meta discussion. (E.g., if I change the tags, I might briefly explain in the edit summary why the tags had to be changed and link to post on meta where it is explained in detail. The same goes for other types of edits.)

As far as I can say, links to twitter accounts are clickable in revision history but links in edit summaries cannot be opened simply by clicking.

According to this post the links are clickable in the iOS app. Having the same on the website (be it desktop or mobile version) would probably make things more comfortable to the users, too.

Improve this question

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
9

While your suggestion seems reasonable, one problem is that edit summaries aren't editable by normal users. That could make it too easy for a bad actor to drop in spam, or links to porn, or other undesirable content that would be difficult to get rid of without Moderator intervention.

I think a case could be made for links that stay within the Stack Exchange network be made "clickable". Elsewise, we'll need a way to report "bad" links in summaries.

Improve this answer
3
  • Edit summaries have recently (within the last year) been made editable by moderators.
    – SevenSidedDie
    Commented Dec 28, 2016 at 16:06
  • The ios app was only mentioned as a side note - since probably somebody would point out the question with very similar title in the list of related questions. Anyway since the question I mentioned is feature request and marked (status-completed), I guess that it was implemented by SE. (In fact, I have never used the ios app, but since it is tagged as status-completed, I believe that it behaves that way.)
    – Martin
    Commented Dec 28, 2016 at 16:07
  • 1
    Aside from that, I certainly agree that limiting this to SE network seems reasonable.
    – Martin
    Commented Dec 28, 2016 at 16:07
4

So I wanted to request the same thing, then I found this, and the point about spam seems to be pretty convincing, although it still seems reasonable to implement it for SE-only links.

However, since I've been on a userscript roll lately, I threw one together for this, it's actually pretty straightforward. It's based off the link replacer from here, which seems to be good enough.

Example results:

enter image description here

By the way, if this makes an argument for implementing this "officially" any more convincing, according to this query, on SO, 1,561,212 of 23,014,479 (6.78%) regular edits contain links in their comments, and the breakdown by history type is:

posthistorytypeid links   total    pctlinks name     
----------------- ------- -------- -------- ---------------------- 
2                 2       35954733 0.00%    Initial Body           
4                 19160   2026248  0.95%    Edit Title             
5                 1534087 20263026 7.57%    Edit Body              
6                 46737   2830770  1.65%    Edit Tags              
7                 58      17394    0.33%    Rollback Title         
8                 61      83213    0.07%    Rollback Body          
9                 7       15915    0.04%    Rollback Tags          
22                45      45       100.00%  Question Unmerged      
35                1424    1424     100.00%  Post Migrated Away     
36                21189   21189    100.00%  Post Migrated Here     
37                1592    1592     100.00%  Post Merge Source      
38                6400    6400     100.00%  Post Merge Destination

I didn't properly check for internal links but a quick back-of-the-napkin scan for %://%stack% seemed to show the vast majority were internal.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .